Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed data needs much less disk space than the initial one, so additional content might be stored using identical amount of space. You will find various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are erased, so once the information is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore each and every web hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have enough power to support this feature. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is called LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any website hosted in a cloud website hosting account on our end because not only does it compress info much better than algorithms used by various file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backup copies more rapidly and on less disk space, so we shall have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always restore all the content that you may have erased by mistake.